Pain was the first thing he felt.
It wasn't sharp—it was precise. Controlled. Like a program executing a shutdown. Hale's vision warped into static, a flicker of red slicing through his field of view. His muscles seized. His body stopped obeying.
Somewhere nearby, the clone's voice cut through the ringing in his skull. "Focus! Fight it!"
But Hale couldn't. His knees hit the concrete. He gasped like a man drowning in code, not water.
"Marionette Protocol: TRIGGER ENGAGED."
"Subject M-008: Obedience Sequence Initiated."
The voice came from nowhere—and everywhere.
Hale saw flashes now. A lab. Restraints. A woman's face behind glass. Moretti.
"You were never meant to wake up," she said in the memory.
The clone knelt beside him, slapping something into his neck—a cold prick of metal. A hiss.
Then blackness.
He came to seconds later, chest heaving. The shaking was gone. The pain, dull. And above him, the clone hovered, breathing hard.
"I scrambled the sequence. For now."
"What the hell was that?" Hale croaked.
"A control trigger. Buried deep in your neural map. They must've activated it when we opened those files. You're rigged, Matt—wired for obedience."
"And you're not?"
"I was. Until I learned how to reprogram myself."
Hale forced himself upright. Sweat clung to his skin like oil. "So they can just... flip a switch and turn me into their puppet?"
The clone didn't answer. That was enough.
"We're not getting out of this with just files," Hale said. "We need to end the whole system."
"There's a kill-switch in the core," the clone said. "But it's locked behind a biometric gate—two matching DNA keys."
Hale frowned. "You mean... us?"
The clone nodded.
A distant boom rocked the walls—security breaching the lower levels.
"We won't have long," the clone muttered. "They'll throw every Cleaner they've got at us. We need to move now."
Hale turned toward the corridor—each step heavier than the last. He didn't know if he was a man anymore. Or just a shadow of someone else's mistake.
But if he was going to die... he'd do it on his own terms.
As they approached the chamber, security footage crackled onto a nearby monitor—
A face appeared.
Moretti.
She was alive. And watching.
"I see you found your brother," she said. "How sweet. Let's see which of you survives the reset."